S. F. artists enlisted to help fight virus
Corps gives creatives roles to play in public health effort
Robin Lara and Stella Adelman of Dance Mission Theater were strapping on stilts. Michael Houston of San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company was affixing a red clown nose on top of his face mask. Marcelo Javier, also of SFBATCO, was trying out a juryrigged pandemic-era clown prop — two extendable massage rollers tied together, allowing him to interact with passersby from a safer distance.
If these artists were backstage — at a side room in the Mission District restaurant West of Pecos — their theater was Valencia Street on a recent sunny afternoon. And if they were about to open a show, their message was public health.
These four, along with Rodney E. Jackson Jr. of SFBATCO and Aura Barba of SF Carnaval, were just one shift of artists in San Francisco Creative Corps, a pilot program that recruits underemployed local artists as community health ambassadors to promote healthy behavior during the pandemic.
A partnership between the San Francisco mayor’s office, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and the San Francisco Parks Alliance, the program launched last month. It employs 30 performing artists to encourage mask wearing and other best practices and 30 visual artists to paint murals about public health on boardedup storefronts.
The city chose Valencia Street and Washington Square in North Beach as pilot sites because of their high pedestrian traffic, significant amounts of outdoor eating and drinking, low mask compliance and high or increasing case rates, according to Jeff Cretan, director of communications at the mayor’s office.
The program is scheduled to run at least through Jan. 3. If feedback is positive, Cretan says, Mayor London Breed is open to extending it.
“Anything that will support artists who we know are really struggling as well as get people back to work is a key priority for her,” he says.
Deborah Cullinan, YBCA’s chief executive officer, approached the city with the idea after being part of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery. “What’s the WPA program for today?” she recalls thinking, referring to
Depressionera initiatives such as the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Art Project that employed artists not just as work relief but as a broad public investment in art and culture and in valuable human capital.
“Artists are very effective in driving health outcomes in communities,” she said, citing projects ranging from a radio drama combating the spread of Ebola in Sierra Leone to National Endowment for the Arts-backed therapy helping veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
She sees SF Creative Corps as part of her and YBCA’s broader work that asks, “How can we assert culturally and socially that artists are absolutely essential? How can we make people understand that you can’t make a change in the world that we want to see if we do not invest in artists and think of artists as earlystage investors in their own communities?”
On Nov. 29, Lara and Adelman — decked in feathers, bustiers and leg flares in addition to their stilts — paraded down Valencia Street, concentrating on the blocks closed to cars, with signs promoting mask wearing (“Masks are sexy”). Barba was their streetlevel counterpart, with a portable speaker slung over her shoulder and more elaborate dance moves, including jaunty hip rolls and mighty swishes of cascades of skirts.
Houston, with blazer, tie, rainbow wig and microphone, in addition to the red nose and mask, approached passersby for man-on-the-street interviews, asking — in a news announcer baritone — what they were doing to keep themselves safe from COVID19. Javier, also in clown mode, might fold his hands into a heart shape at pedestrians who wore masks properly and offer fresh masks from a bag to those who weren’t wearing one. If one accepted, he might do a happy dance, kicking his legs in the air.
The artists never scolded those without masks — emphatically not the point of the program — and pedestrians who were offered masks usually weren’t hostile. Only once in the first two hours did someone yell in response. Most either kept going or accepted, smiling sheepishly as if to say, “Yeah, you’re right. I knew I should have been wearing one.”
The Corps’ training was minimal; the program relied on artists’ existing expertise, telling them the goals but giving them the freedom to decide how to execute.
“We know the who, the where, the when, the why,” Jackson recalls of SFBATCO’s decision to accept YBCA’s invitation to participate. “But we don’t know what the what is.”
Eventually, Javier decided to perform a self-devised character, Wim-bee, who would have been in an SFBATCO show called “Passed Out” that was canceled in the early days of the pandemic. In one moment on Valencia, he might moonwalk to the rhythms of street musicians; in the next, he might strap a whole pile of masks to his face and then snap them off, one by one, in mock striptease. These improvised moments with him and his fellow performers were a reminder that San Francisco could still be a magical place.
“If we need people to take care of one another, they have to feel taken care of first,” said Cullinan. “Messages that make us feel bad aren’t going to work. Messages that make us feel good and want to be a part of something — I don’t want to miss out on that. I want to be there. That’s what theater makers do. They draw you in and you suddenly just behave. It’s that kind of energy that feels full of possibility.”